No no, the worst thing would be having a beer with Lofwyr and everything seems totally normal after.

S-K is my favorite Corp to build stories around because it’s so incredibly easy to make lore-aware players incredibly paranoid.

The dragons are oligarchs.

It wouldn’t have surprised me if WOTC dropped D&D as a brand if Honor Among Thieves had flopped.

And in some cases, the IP getting a shit movie or show can tell the game developers “well, time to drop the entire brand for 15 years”.

Yup. The trans community has been doing this with HRT meds for YEARS because it was either straight up illegal, or almost impossible to obtain access because of the dozens of hoops you had to jump through.

Didn’t they do this with Yakuza?

They likely won’t do anything. The IRS is extremely gun shy about enforcing that doctrine ever since the Church of Scientology thing.

+1 for If Books Could Kill. They’ve kinda run out of shitty famous self help books, but they still do good rundowns on other books now.

I’ll also recommend Michael Hobbes’ other podcast, Maintenance Phase, which is largely about health grifts.

Not these Teslas, from what I understand. The type of glass they use is EXTREMELY resistant to shattering.

I’ll bet you anything it’s taxes.

Rage Against the Machine doing this concert would just be Tom Morello beating every one of them to death with his guitar.

Pretty much this. It’s the radium craze, or the ozone craze, or a whole bunch of other fads - everything has to have AI/LLMs integrated in some way or it’s not “interesting” to shareholders.

Pretty much this. Elon was never interested in what he SHOULD HAVE BEEN: making an inexpensive electric vehicle that’s widely available. Tesla had the tech to do so, but they were being driven to make insane decisions like moving the gearshift to a touchscreen (gee, I love taking my eyes off the road to shift gears), or making “futuristic” doors that actually cannot physically open from the inside (whoops, guess those just can’t be recalled since DOT has literally no teeth).

Also, I think Tesla saw the way the wind was blowing on standardization. Eventually, the DOT will enforce a standard plug, and if it’s not YOURS, suddenly you have to either remanufacture the cars you’re making, or otherwise refit them to work with the new standard.

Exactly this. Surgery is not an option from any reputable doctor before at least 18, and even then you’re fighting uphill even if there’s been an established pattern of care for gender dysphoria. At 6, you just let your child wear what clothes they want, play with what they want, and maybe allow them to try out different names if they want. That’s pretty much it. Literally nobody is suggesting hormones, blockers, or surgery for children, and having a lot of trans friends, I can tell you those are difficult to access even for people with long established gender dysphoria.

They CAN be, depending on the area. My local neighborhood doesn’t have one, and there isn’t anything like that within the area of the city I’m in. “Third places” where you can just hang out with no expectations on you to purchase things or otherwise interact with that place’s services are rapidly disappearing in the US.

One can seriously hope, and moreover hope that the trains are electrified. We seem to be pathologically afraid of re-electrifying rail in the US.

Considering the main oil companies LITERALLY engage in price fixing, openly.

Don’t forget people thinking that scanlines in a news broadcast over Obama’s suit meant that Obama was a HOLOGRAM and ACTUALLY A LIZARD PERSON.

Not really laws, at least in the US. So long as they don’t claim it’s made of things it isn’t, they can say “well the packaging clearly states it’s not real, actual leather”.